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I've posted a few times over the years about a trip I made with my partner to Leipzig in East Germany back in 1984, and I confess that the now-defunct country retains a kind of fascination for me. My rather banal judgement then and now is that the country, though marked by annoying shortages and […]

The new EU fiscal rules being finalised would still leave central- and eastern-European states such as Latvia in a bind.

Per capita access to hospitals, mental health services, and further education facilities in German towns and cities – primarily in the former GDR – now outstrip equivalent areas in England, often several times over, according to a new report.
The post Services across England now lag far behind East Germany, as experts call for 'universal basic infrastructure' in UK appeared first on Bennett Institute for Public Policy.

The long-anticipated move by leftist MP Sahra Wagenknecht to form a new left-populist party opens the prospect of a more active debate within Germany on the policy course taken by the now highly unpopular coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and liberal Free Democrats (FDP).The potential appeal of this new party will depend largely on whether voters agree that the policy of supporting Ukraine is responsible for Germany's economic downturn.Party ConfigurationThe German political scene has evolved in recent decades away from the alternation in power of the center right Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and the center left Social Democrats (SPD), often with the FDP in coalition with one or the other of these, to present a spectrum of parties including the center left Green party, the far-left Die Linke (the Left) party and the right-wing nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD).With the lone exception of AfD, these parties all broadly support Ukraine's war effort, until Ukraine itself is ready to seek a negotiated settlement. CDU/CSU support now stands at 29.4%. The AfD comes second with 21.2%. Support for the three governing parties together has fallen to 35.6%. The AfD's spectacular rise in polls seems to many analysts to suggest a generalized dissatisfaction with the status quo, and not necessarily the sudden conversion of many Germans to far-right extremist views. Wagenknecht has called this a "representation gap," one that her party would seek to exploit. The long-anticipated announcement on October 23 of the launch of a new party led by Die Linke MP Sahra Wagenknecht makes the course of German politics much less predictable. Even more than the AfD, the new party foregrounds its opposition to the prevailing stance on the war in Ukraine. Antiwar politics and the "representation gap"A majority of Die Linke's Bundestag delegation has backed tough sanctions against Russia, while still opposing weapons exports to Ukraine. Tensions within the parliamentary delegation grew as Wagenknecht, in public and in the Bundestag, assailed the sanctions policy and called for the opening of negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. The party has hovered since the last election just below the 5% threshold of support needed to win representation in the Bundestag. The breaking away of Wagenknecht and her nine colleagues from the Die Linke faction reduces that party to a parliamentary group, rather than a faction, affecting its funding and other prerogatives in the Bundestag.Wagenknecht and the nine other Die Linke MPs who have joined her effort to form the new party have provisionally named it the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance. They plan to have the party officially formed and ready to contest the European Parliament elections of June 2024 and three state elections in Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg (all in the former East Germany) later next year. This timing seems well chosen: European Parliament elections are typically favorable to smaller parties, and many voters in the eastern states are, for various reasons, favorable to the Wagenknecht initiative. A snap poll reported on October 31 found that 14% of voters could imagine themselves voting for the new party. This would immediately place it in fourth place, behind the CDU/CSU, AfD, and the SPD, and ahead of the Green party. The new party's impact would be felt mostly on the AfD, but would attract support from all parties other than the Greens and Die Linke itself. Wagenknecht's stated aim is to fill a "representation gap," which means her party will seek to represent those German voters who do not support further arming of Ukraine and who favor efforts to settle the conflict through diplomacy. Evidence of the existence of this gap is the spectacular rise of AfD which began just after Russia's invasion in February of 2022 (when AfD support stood at 9.5%) and more recent polls placing AfD support above 20% since mid 2023. As of March of this year, about 30% of Germans found the arming of Ukraine to have been excessive, and a small majority — 52% — said diplomatic efforts to end the conflict had not been adequate. More recently, a majority (52%) opposed providing Taurus missiles to Ukraine.Wagenknecht's anti-war popularityWagenknecht has been an MP since 2009 and was co-leader of Die Linke in the Bundestag from 2015 to 2019. Born in East Germany, she became active after 1989 in the post-communist Party of Democratic Socialism, initially heading its leftmost, avowedly communist wing. The PDS merged with disaffected leftists of the west German SPD in 2007 and became Die Linke, which for some time enjoyed some electoral success, including in western Germany. Former SPD leader and finance minister, Oskar Lafontaine, was co-founder of Die Linke and is Wagenknecht's husband.Because of her frequent appearances on political talk shows, Wagenknecht is fairly well known to the German public. Often the lone dissenter against the prevailing posture on Ukraine, her arguments are always persuasive, articulate and above all dispassionate. She is a controversial figure, but one that remains among the most popular German politicians. A recent poll showed her finishing third behind Defense Minister Pistorius and CSU leader Markus Söder in national approval ratings.Ukraine War positions: AfD and WagenknechtAlthough AfD's published program states that there can be no viable security order in Europe that excludes Russia, this issue is not often emphasized in their appeal to voters. By contrast, Sahra Wagenknecht's notoriety is entirely wedded to her very public antiwar stance. In February 2023, Wagenknecht joined Alice Schwarzer, a leading anti-war activist and editor of the feminist journal EMMA, to put forward a Manifest für Frieden (Manifesto for Peace) and inviting signatures online.The antiwar demonstration in Berlin on February 25, led by Wagenknecht and Schwarzer, attracted participation by about 10,000 people, but did not produce the momentum that the organizers might have hoped for.Wagenknecht has called herself a "conservative leftist," faulting Die Linke with having built its support base among younger, urban progressive voters while allegedly neglecting voters of the working class. This dispute has taken the form of a contest between an identity vs a class basis of leftist politics. Wagenknecht argues for the refocus of the left on defense of the interests of the German working class. She has sounded some caution about what she sees as excessive openness to flows of migrants.What does it mean?The launch of organizational efforts to form Wagenknecht's new party opens the prospect of a more active debate within Germany on the policy course taken by the weak governing coalition. Wagenknecht has stated that she and her party will not cooperate with AfD. The AfD made a very strong showing in recent state elections in the prosperous western states of Hesse and Bavaria, suggesting that its own potential is not confined to eastern Germany. By filling a tempting "gap" in German politics, the Wagenknecht alliance could endeavor to to curb the rise of AfD.

With no ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas in sight and Houthi forces in Yemen still firing missiles and drones at commercial shipping in the Red Sea, the EU's efforts at addressing conflict in Gaza and its broader regional ramifications keep flailing.After weeks of discussions, the EU officially launched its naval operation in the Red Sea on February 19 to protect international commercial shipping from Houthi attacks. The Houthis claim they wantto force a ceasefire in Gaza. Yet, while the ceasefire remains elusive, the attacks impose real costs on EU members: the EU commissioner for economy Paolo Gentiloni recently estimated that the rerouting of shipping from the Red Sea has increased delivery times for shipments between Asia and the EU by 10 to 15 days and the consequent costs by around 400%. Around 40% of the EU's total trade with the Middle East and Asia passes through the Red Sea.Protecting that shipping route thus is an important collective economic and security interest for the EU. Yet only four countries — France, Germany, Italy and Belgium — out of the 27 member states have agreed to provide warships for the new operation. Spain, which refrained from using its veto power to block the initiative, nonetheless declined to participate, having expressed concerns from the outset that any armed operation would reduce pressure on Israel to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza. A bigger question is how effective this new EU operation will be in countering the Houthi threat given its purely defensive mandate to provide "situational awareness, accompany vessels and protect them against possible attacks at sea." Accordingly, the participating EU warships will be authorized to fire on Houthi targets only if they themselves or commercial vessels they are to protect are attacked. That rules out pre-emptive action against Houthi missile batteries or related targets.The defensive nature of the operation, however, may not be enough to convince the Houthis to refrain from attacking the European ships. In fact, Houthi leaders warned Italy, one of the new operation's chief promoters, that it will become "a target if it participates in attacks on the Houthis." If this threat comes to fruition, will the EU authorize offensive action against the Houthis, potentially drawing itself into a wider conflict? Will it rely on U.S. hard power for protection given that Washington is already engaged against the Houthis through "Operation Prosperity Guardian," in which a few EU nations – Denmark, Netherlands and Greece, as well as non-EU NATO members Britain and Norway -- are also participating? Would such developments not lead to a de facto merging of the U.S. and EU-led operations under Washington's lead — an outcome Europeans sought to avoid and which is the very reason why they launched their own mission in the first place? That these are not abstract questions is underscored by the failure, so far, of scores of U.S.- and UK-led strikes to degrade the Houthis' capabilities to the point where they would no longer pose a significant threat. Indeed, just as the EU announced its mission, the Houthis hit a British cargo ship which was at risk of sinking in the Gulf of Aden in what the Yemeni rebels claimed was their biggest attack yet. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations confirmed the incident, though it did not name the ship.Ironically, the safest way for the EU to avoid a direct military engagement with the Houthis, apart from testing their vow to stop attacking shipping if Israel ends its Gaza offensive, would be to reduce the number of targets in the Red Sea by encouraging ships to reroute. But such an outcome would, of course, vindicate the Houthi strategy to impose costs on the Western powers for the failure to stop the war in Gaza.And that brings us back to the mother of all conflicts in the Middle East: the continuing war in Gaza. The EU's approach so far has been to delink Gaza from the crisis in the Red Sea and the broader escalation in the region, including clashes between Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah. Yet mounting tensions on that front show that its approach is not working. Some actors in the EU understand the urgent need for a ceasefire in Gaza as a necessary condition for regional de-escalation. The EU high representative on foreign policy Josep Borrell has been particularly vocal in his criticism of Israel. He suggested limiting arms sales to Tel Aviv on the grounds that such transfers violate EU guidelines that ban sales to countries accused of violations of the international humanitarian law. A Dutch appeals court recently ordered a halt to exports of F-35 jet parts to Israel on the same grounds. However, it is highly unlikely that the EU as a whole would adopt such a position, given that a number of countries – especially Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary – strongly support Israel.A stronger point of leverage could be to suspend fully or partially the association agreement between the EU and Israel. The EU is Israel's largest trading partner. In 2023, that agreement enabled 46.8 billion euros worth of bilateral trade. The prime ministers of Spain and Ireland, Pedro Sanchez and Leo Varadkar, respectively, asked the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, to "urgently review" whether Israel is violating the human rights clauses included in that agreement. On February 19, the Spanish foreign minister, Jose Manuel Albares, insisted that the review should be completed in time for the next EU foreign ministers meeting on March 18.A full suspension of the agreement seems very unlikely even if the Commission finds Israel to have violated its human rights obligations because that would call for a unanimous decision by all member states. A partial suspension would require a qualified majority: 55% of member states (or 15 out of 27) representing 65% of the EU's total population. Notably, the only precedent for taking such an action came in 2011 when the EU suspended an association agreement with Syria in response to mass violations of human rights by the Bashar al-Assad regime. Meanwhile, the EU proved unable last week to issue even an official appeal to Israel not to follow through with its plans to carry out a ground invasion of Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza, which has become the last refuge of nearly a million refugees from elsewhere in the enclave. In the face of a veto threat by Hungary, the other 26 member states instead issued a joint statement warning of the catastrophic humanitarian consequences should Israel move ahead with such an invasion. Notably, however, Hungary was isolated in its opposition to the appeal as Germany and other member states that have traditionally been reluctant to criticize Israel's conduct of war were on board. That is a step forward, but it's too little and it comes too late. As long as the EU keeps avoiding imposing real consequences on Israel for its conduct, it will keep losing influence in the Middle East.